Suit: Patients Prematurely Declared Brain Dead To Harvest Organs

This is one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever read about, with all the makings of a script of a horror movie.

A nurse practitioner has filed suit against the New York Organ Donor Network, alleging that he was fired when he balked at doctors being pressured to declare patients brain dead — all so their organs could be harvested. The New York Post wrote about the lawsuit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, on Wednesday.

The whistle blower is Patrick McMahon, a vet of the Air Force, who was fired after just four months when he complained about the way the donor network went about meeting its “quota,” as he called it.

The lawsuit cites four cases where McMahon alleges that patients who might have recovered were instead declared brain dead so the organ network could harvest their body parts. I’ll only talk about one of the examples.

According to the Post, last September a 19-year-old man who was hurt in a car accident was sent to Nassau University Medical Center. The patient was “trying to breathe and showed signs of brain activity,” the Post reported. That teen was declared brain dead after his doctors were pressured by donor-network officials, the suit alleges.

The Post reported that during a conference call, a donor-network bigwig said, “This kid is dead, you got that?”

In an interview with the Post, McMahon said that during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan he’d seen soldiers in far worse shape than the 19-year-old recover. That kid’s parents agreed to have his organs harvested, by the way.

The cherry on top of the cake is that McMahon also alleges that the donor network hired coaches to help train staffers to convince a patient’s family to consent to him or her being declared brain dead.

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